Top 25 Smart City Technology CEOs of 2020

The primary goal of a smart city is to create an urban environment that yields a high quality of life to its residents while also generating overall economic growth. To enable this, smart cities use a combination of the IoT devices, software solutions, user interfaces and communication networks. In the modern era, smart city applications aim at gaining these improvements, advance city operations and improve the quality of life among residents. While many cities across the world have started implementing smart technologies, a few stand out as the furthest ahead in development.
Increasingly, cities are setting their sights on how they can use technology to streamline and automate all the processes that come from urbanization. From bringing WiFi and wireless networks to new places to collecting data via IoT-enabled devices that can help make real-time decisions. There are myriad ways that cities can transform the way they operate.
From smartphones, to smart water, to smart cities, the world is getting smarter, and its inhabitants need to keep up. Through this edition, our intention is to introduce to you the Top 25 Smart City Technology CEOs of 2020 who believes in enhancing the future lives of citizens and maximizing efficiency, sustainability and improve life conditions for them. We hope the information will help you gain more insights about smart cities and its applications, and various views of the Top Smart City Technology experts.

Robert Cheetham, President & CEO
An Advanced geospatial technology and research for civic and social impact.

David Lu Co-founder & CEO
A global network of open access air monitoring points to improve citizen engagement and community action.

Christopher Rath, CEO

Fredrik Kekalainen, Founder & CEO
A technology-driven progressive waste management company.

Robert Glatz, CEO
Fybr created an award winning IoT platform with the ability to rapidly prototype and connect virtually any low data-rate sensor to its network

Tagg Jefferson, CEO
GridCure provides modular smart grid SaaS solutions that empower utilities to optimize their operations and customer service.

Gerard van den Houten, Managing Director
At Hyrde we are dedicated to facilitate our customers inrealizing their Internet of Things solutions

Robert Tissing, General Director
We help governments and industry with Luminext systems for managing and controlling public lighting.

Jan Erik Solem, CEO & Co-Founder
The street-level imagery platform that scales and automates mapping using collaboration, cameras, and computer vision.

Kurtis McBride, CEO
Miovision helps build tomorrow’s smart cities by transforming the way traffic is managed today.

Navin Nageli, CEO & President

Tal Kreisler, Co-Founder & CEO
NoTraffic is the World’s First Autonomous Traffic Management Platform

Jean-Marc Lazard, Founder & CEO
Opendatasoft is the leading solution for data sharing

Nate Morris, Founder & CEO
Technology company providing waste, recycling, and smart city solutions. Our mission is to end waste.

Toon Vanparys, CEO
Sentiance is a data science company turning IOT sensor data into rich insights about people’s behavior and real-time context.

Ludovic Le Moan, CEO & Co-Founder
Sigfox is the world’s leading provider of connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT).

Ivo Rook SVP-IoT
Curiosity™ brings networks and software closer together, helping cities transform faster to places where people want to live and businesses want to invest.

Laura Schewel, CEO
World’s only interactive transportation data platform, providing on-demand metrics for vehicles, bikes and pedestrians.

Brent Hudson, CEO
Telensa makes wireless smart city control systems, including the worlds most deployed smart streetlight solution

Ian Aaron, CEO
Ubicquia offers municipalities, utilities and broadband service providers a cost effective and expandable platform.

Mark Masongsong, CEO & Co-Founder
UrbanLogiq helps governments build better communities with data.

Josh Brumberger, CEO
A global software company that works with electric utilities to enhance energy efficiency and grid security.

Christine Boyle, Founder & CEO
Valor Water Analytics develops customized financial data and dashboard tools for water utilities and businesses

Maher Aboukadir, CEO

Akiva Armon, CEO & Founder
Wisesight is a state of the art parking supervision technology that make the parking procedure easy.

The third pillar of a smart city – Development of social infrastructure
Imagine a city has everything that it takes to be called as a smart city; the basic amenities, physical infrastructure, well-planned governance institution and all. Can the city be still termed as a smart city? A city needs a better social engagement. It indicates a development planning of social infrastructure. People’s participation creates a wider scope for smart city development process. Let’s take a closer look at the sectors that create the threshold of social infrastructure; without which no city can be developed as a smart city. Education – In order to improve the student’s level of education and understanding, the concept of smart classroom has become extremely important. Nowadays the classrooms are designed to provide adequate information and knowledge. It is built in such a way that students gather and finds it extremely interesting and engaging. If teachers wish to monitor in real-time the level of their student’s interest, they can collect on the class, department and university. It will help the teachers to monitor and respond to the class level of interest. The various aspects in the classroom will help department or university to understand how various are correlated with the level of attention.

Smart City and its growing impact
The idea of a smart city has become extremely important when it comes to the context of defining the strength, performance, facility, demography and urban economy. How a smart city would perform? In what ways we can identify a smart city? When it comes to understanding a city in terms of scientific growth and implementing important policies with the right quotient of strategies, it has a tremendous impact on the socio-economic growth of the place and worldwide. Several reports and research studies indicated there will be a continuous rise in the population living in the urban city. Under this circumstance, the present Government needs to tighten the loose ends. The first important aspects are to make all the resources easily available for the people to utilize. Not just basic resources, but when it comes to luxurious resources, the people living in the urban city have first access to it. A person’s mind is extremely inquisitive; they search for the technology that makes their life extremely easy and convenient. In a way, this contributes to the economic and social growth in a city but gives their poor environmental sustainability.

The fourth pillar of a smart city – Development of economic infrastructure
To develop an ideal city that will the future filled with opportunities, it requires a basic economic infrastructure. There are two fundamental goals that any smart city would try to achieve. The first fundamental goal is to create a high-quality living environment with the right investment and planning. And the second objective is to make sure that the development is sustainable based on all integrated models like economic, social, transport, energy, environmental, and more. An objective of a smart city is to provide a modern quality of life that would include the use of innovative technologies to provide cost-effective and environmentally friendly city-life support systems. The growth plan includes making your city the industrial cities with science, innovation, and technology parks, slowly gaining control over the accommodation, people, environment, economy, and mobility. To study the features of socio-economic development, the service sector in the urban economy has created a framework of research on the synergetic paradigm of modern science. They consider the conceptual results of evolutionary and institutional economics, the theory of economic transformation, strategic management theory, and social economy theory.

The second pillar of a smart city – Development of physical infrastructure
When all focus is on building your smart city, how can we negate the role of the development of physical infrastructure? The purpose of physical infrastructure towards the development of a smart city is essential and critical. It provides the base foundation upon which a smart city is developed. Due to an increase in population and pollution, our Earth is going through a series of environmental changes. Our world is open to countless challenges every day. To have a smart city, developing smart physical infrastructure is vital. It is fundamentally essential because technology should be intelligently used. Today, some of the critical information technology (IT) companies have provided solutions for a sustainable planet and city, and by far the technology plays an important role in achieving this. Smart physical infrastructure is making our world a better place to live. An excellent physical infrastructure integrated with intelligent technology provides a strong resistance to certain environmental imbalance and shock. When your city is equipped with the latest and modern technology, your strong infrastructure can withstand natural calamities or environmental changes. You take a step ahead to set an example for the people who haven’t thought of the solution before.

The first pillar of a smart city – Institutional development
The concept of the smart city differs from person to person. For some, a city flourishes with its institutional growth, and for some, an excellent infrastructural development is a definition of a progressive city. To understand the sustainability and transition of a smart city, we must first trace the organic growth in its socio-technical system, which means that there is a need for a noticeable change in the institutional-material structures of the smart city. – “Regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life” (Scott, 1995) The three prominent dimensions that need to be carefully considered to order to determine the development of a city as a smart city are as follows: Regulative – A city requires explicit regulatory processes, such as formal rules, laws, policies, protocols, and standards to constitute a developed city. In case if a city fails to comply with these rules, there may have more profound implications in terms of legal sanctions. When we try and analyze how a city can develop based on the above points, we have a fair idea and understanding that the institutional analysis of smart city initiatives would elaborate on the formal dimensions of these initiatives. This should be done in such a way in which they are deep-rooted in urban, regional, national, or even international policy initiatives for urban development.
